Maison Margiela / Spring 2014 Couture

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Couture homewear: no—it’s not what you think, but nothing ever is at Maison Martin Margiela when the team gets going on its punningly clever ideas for the artisanal couture show. The spring collection is literally made from home furnishing fabrics, curtain material, and carpets, with the twist that the clothes all looked as if they’d come from the residence of someone with a taste for living in arty mid-century-modern style. A further twist to set it all in a Margiela-type “luxury” context: The fabrics were collector’s items in themselves; bolts and scraps of printed materials variously designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Raoul Dufy, and Mariano Fortuny. All the provenances were recorded in meticulous detail in the program notes—but you could also read it straight out, because the names printed on the selvedges proved it. Print, other than trompe l’oeil, hasn’t had much of a place in the Margiela world till now, but this was a really smart way of introducing it, especially when it came to a pair of great pantsuits made from Dufy’s colorful flower patterns. Take that, everyone who says “print is over.” No, it isn’t, when it can suddenly look this cool.

Bricolage, repurposed vintage clothes, found objects, and references to the tools of the fashion trade are the foundation of the Martin Margiela way of doing things. That’s why the embroidery here is actually a mass of buttons, ring-pulls, keys, and chains applied to dresses and vests molded in the dressmaker’s dummy Stockman shape. In its anti-luxe materials, that might make it seem the exact opposite of the extravagant handmade wonders produced by Lesage for establishment couture houses, but it’s not a joke either. The results here are every bit as meticulously achieved and time-consuming as the officially haute. Whoever is in charge behind the scenes these days is also highly adept at turning appropriations—like a couple of sweeping coats made out of Aubusson carpet or antiques—into pieces which are not just arch showstoppers, but also evidently desirable.

Wearable is often a diss-word in fashion, typically meant to indicate work of a lower order of creativity, but these clothes have the confidence to pull that off (see the sequined striped pajama pants) without compromising the reputation of intellectual ethos this house depends on.

So this is all good news. Since the brilliant Martin Margiela left the company, the brand has found it hard to retrieve its credibility in the eyes of all those who regarded Belgium’s mysterious designer as the closest thing to God. Now, there’s a distinct feeling that the creative torch is in the hands of someone who gets everything Margiela was about. Thank goodness, that doesn’t mean designing in the spirit of Margiela. There’s nothing more deadly to fashion than the corporate design-séances that go on when creative people are made to second-guess what a departed genius might have done. Would Martin Margiela have produced this spring couture collection, were he still working in 2014? Who knows? It no longer matters, because the house he built is looking forward—while also feeling excitingly like home to the faithful.